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Psychoanalysis has been linked to classical antiquity from its birth. The study of Hellenic and Roman antiquities was a formative inspiration for the development of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. But how should we today understand the relationship between the study of the Greco-Roman world and the modern analytic and therapeutic theory of the soul? As a classicist and a comparatist studying Freud's fascination with antiquity, it became clear to me that the key to this question is in the Freudian unconscious, whose textual and cultural potential is the core of my book, The Ancient Unconscious.
The unconscious is located neither in antiquity nor in modernity. It functions, rather, as an intersection between ancient and modern plots, and shows itself in the juxtaposition of ancient and modern texts. Take, for example, Freud's 1936 essay “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” where he recalls and analyzes a dramatic episode in his history. This episode is a central junction in my book. In 1936 Freud, at 80, was still in Vienna, three years before he died as an exile in London. In his essay he returns to a memory of his visit to Athens in 1904 when he was 48 years old. This memory, and its uncanny aftermath in consciousness, had continued to occupy Freud since then. His account of the episode amalgamates different textual phases of his memory, and through them Freud reflects on the dynamic and changing senses of antiquity that have unfolded through different points in his life. The memory concerns a journey that Freud and his younger brother, Alexander, made to Athens from Trieste. The opportunity to go abroad to Athens came unexpectedly and filled the brothers with a strange gloom and tormenting deliberations; these are eventually shown to camouflage their high expectations of visiting the Acropolis. The ancient destination aroused great excitement in the two travelers. Ancient Athens, a synecdoche